Enter The Mind Of A Madman!

Entirely boggled to learn there’s a subset of #OurFlagMeansDeath fandom who think that Ed isn’t canonically a BIPOC character? Because they don’t say aloud that he is? My beige dudes, the actor is Māori. They cast a Māori actress to play his mother. This was not an accident. 

Taika has always been proudly vocal about his mixed heritage and the fact they canonically gave Ed a white father and a Māori mother is so important in the context of Ed’s character. The show is set at Peak Empire, when England (and Europe) colonised everything.

There’s a powerful thread of subtext of this history within her characterisation and this show doesn’t do anything accidentally: she is a house servant, trapped in poverty, abused and controlled by her white partner, and conditioned to believe that “it’s not up to us, it’s up to God”.

For anyone unfamiliar with European colonialism, the role the church played in it is toxic. The stolen generations and the people descended from the kids put through the Christian school systems are a legacy of it: children of indigenous people abducted and forcibly cut off from their culture to be ‘civilised’ through Christianity and assimilated into a white-centric culture. The entire system was a genocidal horror story perpetuated in the name of God for centuries in almost every single colony. The children were abused and conditioned to believe they were lesser, better than their heritage but still never good - ‘white’ - enough. “We’re not that kind and never will be”.

So when Ed’s mother says “it’s not up to us, it’s up to God”, that is the voice of a child of colonial violence repeating what she was taught by abuse and by rote to make sure she knows her humble place in the world order created by the Christian Empires. The fact she’s a servant is also so integral to this. The Christian schools trained the children to be workers but most specifically in low-level manual/domestic work. The people running the show didn’t want them getting ideas above their station, after all. 

Not a word of this show is incidental. The history is there if you listen to it and it makes the red silk scene devastating because we are seeing a woman from a colonised culture literally and metaphorically pass that trauma on to her son. 

Think of the first time we see the silk: it is immediately in the aftermath of Ed’s encounter with the French Captain. This is the moment when Ed is faced with the same level of racial abuse as Frenchie and Olu get from the white Navy officers in episode 1 - “made by savages”, “silence, slave!” “your master may tolerate uppity behaviour”.

The Captain refers to Ed as “your kind”, immediately designating him as something Other and Uncivilised by comparison to himself. Ed reels as if slapped at that alone, asking tersely “what’s that supposed to mean?”. The man derisively says “a rich donkey is still a donkey”.

But no, sure, tell me there’s nothing inherently racist about a posh white man describing a brown man in terms of a beast of burden, something meant for manual work, carrying things for its owner and known for being beaten into submission. /end sarcasm. In many documents from that era, this was a common way for white (especially English) Europeans to write about anyone not white, regardless of rank, culture or history: comparisons with animals, beasts, lower creatures are all over the place. (eta: it has also been confirmed that donkey itself was commonly used as a slur against Polynesian and Pasifika people, which makes this a deliberately targeted racist insult)

Ed, unsurprisingly, does not react well. The fact that this is the thing to make him lose his temper for the first time underscores how distressing it is for him, especially when it segues into the flashback to his mother, repeating that same lesson to him.

Okay one of the reasons Blackbeard is so famous is he once held an entire town hostage. He and several other pirates blocked all ships from entering or leaving Charleston, South Carolina. He also seized control of several ships and took hostages, many of whom were the elite of Charleston. One of the odd things about this raid was that Blackbeard didn’t demand money from the town but medical supplies. The ransom being a huge chest of medicine, (sources vary on how much but about 400 lbs of medical supplies). In real life, Blackbeard most likely needed the medicine for his crew who all suffering from all manner of diseases at the time (mostly STDs).

But PICTURE IT: it’s not his ill crew Blackbeard’s holding a town hostage for, It’s stede. I’m imagining Stede somehow gets super wounded (shot, stabbed, caught TB, etc) and is at death’s door. The ship doesn’t have any medical supplies on board. So Ed does the only thing he can think of, hold an entire town hostage until they give him medical care.

Then 1x05 happens and we can see his fascination develop into bemused affection and even admiration, so much so that at the end of the episode he’s actually going in for a kiss. We quite literally watch Stede gently taking Ed’s heart!

But still, in 1x06, Ed let’s Izzy convince him to kill Stede. We can’t know for sure if he would have gone through with it, but it’s likely. When Izzy challenges Stede to a duel, Ed lets it happen. His loyalty to Stede and his loyalty to his first mate hang in a precarious balance and he hasn’t chosen a side yet. In spite of this beautiful moment of vulnerability in the bathtub, Ed isn’t ready to give up everything for Stede. He has a big old crush on him and he feels safe with Stede, but not quite safe enough to leave his former life behind.

He even considers leaving in the next episode! He thinks he has become too infatuated, too vulnerable. Then Stede drags him on this treasure hunt that he genuinely hates. But Ed realises (with the help of Lucius, of course) that in spite of that, it makes him happy to make Stede feel good, and, I believe that this is when he becomes aware that this is more than just a crush. He’s fallen head over heals for this bizarre little man.

1) the angst is absolutely delicious